"From New York City to Addis Ab-ab-ab-ab-a / Keep on keeping on"

December2008

Three ancient statues sit at a dig at el-Hassa, the site of a Meroitic town in Sudan in this undated photograph. Archaeologists said on Tuesday they had discovered three ancient statues in Sudan with inscriptions that could bringthem closer to deciphering one of Africa’s oldest languages. René-Pierre Dissaux/Section Française de la Direction des Antiquités du Soudan

The ancient African language that anyone can speak but no one can understand.

KHARTOUM, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Archaeologists said on Tuesday they had discovered three ancient statues in Sudan with inscriptions that could bring them closer to deciphering one of Africa’s oldest languages.

The stone rams, representing the god Amun, were carved during the Meroe empire, a period of kingly rule that lasted from about 300 BC to AD 450 and left hundreds of remains along the River Nile north of Khartoum.

Vincent Rondot, director of the dig carried out by the French Section of Sudan’s Directorate of Antiquities, said each statue displayed an inscription written in Meroitic script, the oldest written language in sub-Saharan Africa.

“It is one of the last antique languages that we still don’t understand … we can read it. We have no problem pronouncing the letters. But we can’t understand it, apart from a few long words and the names of people,” he told reporters in Khartoum.

So here’s the quote that spoiled my breakfast this morning. It came in an anti-American diatribe from Alfatih Ziada, a columnist for the state Sudan Vision newspaper:

America has a leader (Bush) who is tough and assertive, willing to employ pre-emptive, penetrating power. Unfortunately, as we all know, and all Viagra users experience, he is a leader displaying the same fictitious masculinity that, when the rhetorical rage of patriotism, imperialism and Christian crusade ebbs, will, like a Viagra hard-on, shrink to reveal his true, pathetic natural manhood.

I thought one of the benefits of living under Sharia law was that you were spared this kind of imagery in the popular press.